No Room for the Living

Hallucinatory vigor and a sense of mission -- these are what, in her best moments, the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat brings to her sobering novel about ''two different peoples trying to share one tiny piece of land.''

The setting is the border country of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and the year is 1937, a place and time when the longstanding hostility between the Dominican Republic and its neighbor, Haiti, is about to erupt into bloodshed, carefully orchestrated by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo Molina. But Amabelle Desir, the Haitian housemaid who is the novel's narrator, gives little credence to the rumors of imminent violence. Instead, her focus is on the worries of her immediate household.

Amabelle's Dominican mistress, Senora Valencia, is still recovering after giving birth to twins, then quickly losing one of them to crib death. In addition, a field laborer from a nearby sugar cane plantation has been killed in a hit-and-run accident, and the Senora's soldier husband is the culprit. As Amabelle and her Haitian lover, Sebastien Onius (who witnessed the killing), are drawn into the funeral arrangements for the dead man, they must consider the matter of avenging his death. And facing this crisis also means acknowledging what they mean to each other. In short, there's drama enough in Amabelle's immediate vicinity to distract her from whatever larger fate the Generalissimo has in mind for his country's Haitian minority -- until the slaughter begins, and she and Sebastien become separated in their efforts to escape it.

Danticat -- the author of one earlier novel, ''Breath, Eyes, Memory,'' and a story collection, ''Krik? Krak!'' -- capably evokes the shock with which a small personal world is disrupted by military mayhem. Even the title of ''The Farming of Bones'' reflects this duality, referring both to the grueling work that takes place on the sugar cane plantations and, implicitly, the massacre to come. Despite this complex shading, the novel doesn't consistently achieve the nimble intensity of Danticat's strongest work in ''Krik? Krak!''

The trouble, perhaps, is that Danticat's storytelling invention has been inhibited by the respect she has for her novel's historical sources. It is surely telling that the prickly yet affectionate servant-mistress bond between Amabelle and Senora Valencia (Amabelle always refers to her as ''Senora,'' even though the women grew up together) feels more astutely observed than the relationships among the Haitian characters, who are too uniformly noble to be entirely convincing. It also feels contrived when, in a flashback, Danticat orphans the young Amabelle on the Dominican-Haitian border during peacetime, although the account of her parents' death is unsettling enough to work.

There are technical oddities as well that detract from the power of Danticat's story. The novel opens with what appear to be two alternating narrators -- suggested by different typefaces and contrasting prose styles. Yet it soon becomes clear that both voices belong to Amabelle, a device that seems miscalculated and unnecessary. More worrying are moments when the book's dialogue smacks of historical-epic-speak. (''Do you know that you can trust him who offered this place to you?'')

Thankfully, there's no such creakiness in most of the descriptive prose. Danticat knows the value of understatement in bringing nightmarish scenes to life, and a spare, searing poetry infuses many of the book's best passages. The randomness of death; the second-guessing about where safety lies; the silence after an act of butchery in a remote mountain farm: all are eerily evoked, as is the fluid heedlessness of a crowd's hysteria when Trujillo appears in a border town at the height of the violence.

Some readers will wish that Danticat had supplied more information on the wider context of Haitian-Dominican animosity, including the two countries' long history of mutual invasion. But her primary concern is to depict the unfortunate lot of the Haitian migrant laborers who have only ''the cane to curse, the harvest to dread, the future to fear,'' and who have no politics beyond an instinctive clan loyalty and the need to seek work wherever it might be.

''The Farming of Bones'' doesn't end with the massacre. Rather, Danticat probes its aftermath in scenes that, although lacking the momentum of the book's earlier chapters, vividly convey the strangeness of the survivors' plight and the sense of unfinished business in what is left of their lives: the marriages that might have been, the savings that went up in smoke. At times, the novel reads like a small-scale ''Gone With the Wind,'' retold from the servants' point of view. It also provides an unnerving reminder that the appalling rationale and logistics of ''ethnic cleansing'' have been with us for a very long time.

Not surprisingly, given her subject matter, Danticat's customary wry wit is present only in small doses -- as when Amabelle, a spur-of-the-moment midwife helping to deliver Senora Valencia's second twin, remarks, ''I was feeling more experienced now.'' Later there is also a hideous dark humor in the absurd minutiae of persecution: the pronunciation test given to suspected Haitians whose inability to trill the Spanish ''r'' in ''perejil'' (''parsley'') could result in a death sentence.

In these and other passages, ''The Farming of Bones'' offers ample confirmation of Edwidge Danticat's considerable talents. Yet her finest work has led us to expect even more.